1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the field of image processing and, more particularly, to the use of references to construct a mosaic.
2. Description of the Related Art
Multiple images of a scene are related by a set of motion transformations. Given these transformations, the images may be warped to a central coordinate system and merged to construct an image mosaic. See for example commonly owned and copending applications Ser. Nos. 08/339,491, filed Nov. 14, 1994, entitled SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATICALLY ALIGNING MOSAICS TO FORM A MOSAIC IMAGE; 60/021,295, filed Jul. 17, 1996, entitled METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MOSAIC IMAGE CONSTRUCTION; 08/493,632, filed Jun. 22, 1995, entitled METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR IMAGE COMPENSATION USING A PARALLAX BASED TECHNIQUE and 60/015,577, filed Apr. 18, 1996, entitled COMPUTATIONALLY EFFICIENT DIGITAL IMAGE WARPING, each of which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. As a part of the alignment process, it is also possible to recover scene information such as 3D parallax and the motion of independently moving objects. Discrete feature correspondence based and direct gradient based methods have been used to compute the motion transformations. However, in all the traditional techniques, especially the ones relying on direct intensity gradients, one image and its coordinate system have been assumed to be ideal and distortion free.